With Reddit just announcing ai mods for sub reddits I think it’s finally time I fully give it up. I’ve been slowly trying to transition back into the fediverse but damn is it hard sometimes. Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab, I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about. Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week. If I wasn’t so dedicated to dropping Reddit I think the average Joe would have left by now seeing all of this. And YES I have been trying to be the change I want to see if you check my profile I regularly post in meme subs non political just funny memes to be like “lmao” and people can move about their day. I’m not saying there ISNT other type of content on lemmy or piefed it just feels like the stuff that floats to the top is political
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You can just curate your experience by making changes to the feed and shutting off what you feel are sources of distressing content.
Given the current state of affairs where if being a progressive American is a harrowing struggle, it’s not surprising the fediverse is a refuge and outlet for angry progressives and people who have been alienated by spez’s war on left-leaning content, as he will ban anyone even remotely or casually talking of committing violence on awful fascists.
I really don’t see that many political posts in my subscribed feed and don’t see all that much on my Lemmy.world all feed either.
Most of my blocks have been just furry porn and the worst tankies on .ml
Lemmy.world is defederated from hexbear, Lemmygrad, and beehaw so maybe try blocking those instances if it’s too much for you
There’s also no curated algorithm to cause that dopamine rush, that causes the addiction, so you want to scroll and hit those juicy dopamine posts, but without the manipulation designed to keep you engaged and stuck, not going to happen. So it’s also a great place to detox from your brain being in the habit of seeking dopamine that way, it’s like a slow lowering to the ground, instead of cold turkey.
I was really feeling the loss of those dopamine hits, when I first transitioned over here, but now I don’t look for those hits here at all, and I can just enjoy a small scroll, without getting stuck in here, and put my phone down, which is nice.
What reddit and Facebook do, is hugely manipulative and created and curated to trap you there. I don’t know if that needs to be the same here, as much. And maybe curating your home page, really is the way to go.
What juicy dopamine posts are you talking about?
there are a handful of users who just post shitty low quality rage bait from shitty websites constantly across various communities all day long. many of these users were not on fedi a year ago.
like, websites you have never heard of, that are highly editorialized and frame things as dramatic and hyperbolic as possible.
and these posts dominate many of the news and politics communities, because juicy dopamine headlines mean people upvote.
and the comment sections are dumpster fires of similar minded folks, and anyone who is skeptical/critical gets dog piled and/or the OP comes out swinging calling them a fascist for daring to challenge the ‘trump does thing world is collapsing’ narrative they are all addicted to.
it’s all engagement/rage bait quality stuff. it’s not like, respectable moderate journalism that reports facts, that shit doesn’t get upvotes because the headlines are not juicy enough.
FWIW I have been on fedi for 3 years and this stuff is exploded the past 6-9 months, I used to like the news/politics subs a year ago because they were not dominated by this low quality content and typically had more respectable news-sources. but you can’t compete with low-brow rage bait trolls who are just here to collect as many upvotes and flood the zone with dramatic bullshit to drive engagement, and that’s what these posters are doing. if you confront them they just say you are a bad person who clearly supports Trump etc.
I don’t like how people talk about The Algorithm™ as though any feed algorithm is inherently a problem and exists to keep people trapped in the app.
I’d love to have an algorithm automatically curated my feed so I don’t have to manually curate it, since the curation tools are so coarse.
PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.
I mean curation by community is too coarse. Often communities have a mixture of posts I’m interested in and posts that I’m not.
The idea of communities makes sense from a moderation perspective, but I don’t like it from a feed/search perspective.
What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just “gaming”.
PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior “enthusiasts” in a community while excluding all those “hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far”), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people’s account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also “follow” users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.
Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I’m saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is “lost” that way.
PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.
The Threadiverse isn’t like “dying” or anything, but it’s definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.
Automatic personalized feed curation, imo, would make it better, based on tags added by the author, by the reader, and by automatic classification, which is then weighted against your previous interaction with posts with those tags and explicit user preferences regarding those tags.
In other words, an option for an automatic personalized feed algorithm. But people here (and the devs) are against it because it’s a boogeyman.That said piefed at least lets multiple tags be added to a post where Lemmy doesn’t, so that’s the minimum bar for something like what I’m describing.
But it’s a chicken and egg problem because the tags aren’t helpful for manual or automatic curation until more people actually use them accurately. So tldr I don’t have a solution.
It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it… but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.
And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.
The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It’s sad to see it struggling so much but… writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.
In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don’t even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I’ve learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one’s goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).
I do enjoy tiktok, although the longer it exists (and the longer it’s under American control) the more I feel the negative effects of “the algorithm” in that it’s not just building an echo chamber by accident but it’s intentionally showing me or not showing me things for their own gain.
I want an algorithm, but I don’t want an Algorithm ™
I hope piefed takes off because I like it. But still maybe it’s for the best that I use it as an excuse to disconnect completely from social media
Lemmy was created because of Reddit censoring political content.
If you don’t wanna see political stuff go to a different website.
The above is not a value judgement. If I did not want to be exposed to the sun and the public then I wouldn’t go to a park. If I did not want to be exposed to loud car sounds and screaming fans I wouldn’t go to the racetrack. It’s okay that you don’t want to see political stuff (you should think critically about what you think is political and why). You don’t need to go to lemmy or any other fediverse thing. You can just be a Redditor.
lovingly, with approval and understanding go away.
I’ve been on lemmy since before it even federated, so I’m happy with the left-wing political and tech focused topics of discussion available.
That said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to get away from monolithic social media and also want the sort of “non-political” content they are used to getting. There’s no reason they can’t do both, and I think we should encourage federated social media and direct people away from corporate social media at every opportunity. If people can comfortably get their memes and news and hobby discussions on the fediverse, that’s only a good thing. Ownership of that needs to be taken away from Reddit.
I just want to get away from self-righteous agenda posters. who are so indoctrinated they think everyone else is exactly like them and if they aren’t, they are terrible awful people.
it’s not even a political thing, there are many folks in hobby and other groups that approach life this way, trying to shove their opinions down everyone else’s throats and demonizing them for not agreeing, and/or playing the victim when someone pushes back against their shitty ‘i know better than you’ bullshit.
I think I sympathize completely. I find even people I ostensibly agree with on almost everything to sometimes be obnoxious. I think different people are looking for different things when it comes to using these platforms and this sometimes leads to poor results.
They are used to getting “non-political” content because Reddit kicked out the “political” people and closed the “political” subs.
Going to the place that those people and communities now reside and complaining that everything feels “political” is ridiculous, but there might be good reasons why a person would do it, like you said.
You’re right that it’s not unreasonable to ask for what they’re asking for. That’s why I tried my god damnedest to clearly and kindly explain that this might not be the right place for them. Not everywhere needs to be for everyone. It’s not an insult to tell someone they’re looking for the library, this is the bus terminal.
Others are espousing different ways to harness the technology using blocks and a subscription feed. If someone believes that an alternative to corporate social media should be for everyone (an explicitly political belief!) then that will be borne out by successful block and sub use. The user might also not succeed at using those tools. In that case they don’t have to stay. They can recognize that they want the curated, “nonpolitical” experience of Reddit. I am not making a judgement of them for wanting that, only recommending they go and get what they want.
even if I agree politics should be discussed more openly than what reddit allows, dude we need to make this space more welcoming, bot telling people to go away.
.ml users think they are being welcoming and kind when they harass and insult other users.
The op is welcome here. When they don’t want to be here they’re welcome to not be.
They can leave. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not an admonition or reprisal for me to say that.
Use block lists. I’ve blacklisted tons of keywords. Mostly political. If you’re looking at an unfiltered feed then you’re going to have a bad time.
Politics is kinda the default for lemmy.world, lemmy.hexbear, and lemmy.ml. If you don’t want politics, join an alternate server rather than .world. Or, alternatively, start curating your list of communities to block the comms channels that provide politics. That latter option is kinda what I did.
Sort by all and block as you go, I feel like that’s easier.
Yeah, I get it, I wish more people used lemmy and that there is more apolitical stuff on here
However, neither are going to happen, without enormous efforts to buck the existing trends. See e.g. these recent comments from a community that was considering whether to switch from Reddit to the Threadiverse (https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/):
I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.
There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic
There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit
Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier
Sadly, these seem representative of how people think of us here. You can see it for yourself too: simply browse most instances from an account without your existing blocks, in order to see what it is like from the eyes of a Redditor. Worse, they are primarily Christian centrists, and not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️
There was a brief moment when Lemmy had ~65k active users, immediately during the Rexodus. That quickly fell to ~55k, which then fell to a more stable ~45k, and nowadays we are down to ~35k. And this is despite how Reddit is even in a process of killing off old-reddit, which is what we all said was going to be the signal for the end of Reddit and the great migration here. Tbf it is still early in that process, but it’s already started, it’s not some future date it’s happening now. And the people there say that there is no way in hell that they will come here. Maybe Bluesky, but not Lemmy.
Perhaps that’s fine - perhaps we are collectively okay with remaining niche, and most content (even some of the morenhighly technical stuff) staying on Reddit, but since your comment expressed the opposite desire, I thought I would try to point out that it is simply not going to happen - not unless there is a major change (bc otherwise simply doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result tends to not work out so well).
Perhaps the upcoming release of Lemmy v1.0, when moderator reports will finally begin federating out to other instances, can help create spaces that are more free of the types of behaviors that are currently causing people to avoid us here like the plague. I somewhat doubt it but… it’s possible? Lemmy will always remain tiny, so it is perhaps best that we make our peace with that. Sorry, it is what it is.
I respectfully disagree with your opinion. Maybe one day more people would lemmy, but you do have a point there
A lot problems are going to have to be addressed and one day more people will use lemmy,
Maybe one day people realize that not everyone on lemmy is a tankie and once that happens more people would use it
That’s the thing, many of these people self-report that they have tried. These are the ones who got over the hurdle of “it’s too complicated” and bravely dived right in. We here who use Linux btw aren’t afraid of such, but ofc to many people that is still daunting. But anyway, there are MANY who did come here… only to nope right back out, some of them retuning to Reddit.
And at least some of those - at least it definitely does not seem rare or even uncommon (it may even be fully common if not quite average) - remained here for years. They did not simply pop in for a day, not like what they saw, and popped right back out: they stuck with us, if not visiting daily then at least off and on for multiple years.
And then they abandoned the Threadiverse, going around trashing our reputation to anyone who will listen. And, given the several posts related to this topic just within the last week alone, not without good reasons. Even we who remain here (for however much longer) don’t like what we see.
Perhaps part of the problem is how we talk about it: I don’t care about discussions with “tankies” in relation to whatever political beliefs someone may have, I care about discussions with “trolls” and “incels” for whom no means push forward harder, who do not respect any boundaries and so turn people away from this platform, sometimes the moment they set foot here while other times in the longer term sense. We don’t so much have a “tankie problem” (that is in reference to a famous title of an old post here several years ago), we have a… what exactly? Though if we go down that route, it’s not a simple, single explanation but rather multiple - like trolls (hexbear) and doomerism posts and incels (meh, all social media has those though, it’s just that our overall lack of moderation tools allows them to thrive more here than elsewhere). The word “tankie” has come to symbolize all of those, in part bc it fits, if not extremely well then at least better than any other singular word?
But I want to stress that we do not merely have an image problem, so much as major structural ones. For the people coming here, having to choose between man vs. bear (our often unmoderated spaces that in many ways resemble 4chan, vs. the overly moderated fascist partners like Reddit and X that heavily limit what you are allowed to say), despite how we might think that their choice is “stupid”, even so they have chosen the bear… and the are strongly encouraging others to do the same (while in contrast I only see like <10 people on all of Reddit saying otherwise, that people should come here to check us out - and even there it’s often like Beehaw or mander.xyz while browsing locally, neither of which would act as a Reddit replacement for more than their specific subreddit, except the situation is even worse than that since those are both non-starters, on a large enough scale to migrate an entire subreddit here).
Yeah, this unfortunately. But I’m a bit cautiously optimistic about the fediverse. It’s not perfect, lemmy is not perfect, it has flaws yes, there are some bad people who use the fediverse yes, however in my opinion not enough people use lemmy and the fediverse
Oh the Threadiverse will definitely continue, and arguably it being smaller is even a good thing, helping to avoid attracting bot spam on the same level as corporate enshittified platforms. But I don’t think very many additional people will use it than this - in fact all prior trends since the Rexodus have shown quite a dramatic decrease instead - and therefore the topics covered, especially apolitical ones, are going to have to be “carried” by an ever-smaller and smaller subset of people who are willing to put in the work to add content. Which itself is daunting bc then whenever you post or comment you expose yourself to downvotes and toxic insane dumbshit replies, or more commonly merely silence in return.
People are only willing to put up with such for so long, before reaching for other alternatives (like going to a local library and reading a physical book?). And btw this is not unique to the Threadiverse with tankies, it’s an extremely prevalent effect across all Fediverse platforms - e.g. here is a very interesting article talking about the identical effect (maybe less on the side of outright trolling) on Mastodon as well: https://wingolog.org/archives/2024/09/24/fedi-is-for-losers. Fwiw I kinda like that terminology, except it can be so easily misunderstood: like we aren’t merely “losers” here as in opposition to “winners” as the article claims, but rather in opposition to “gainers” as in greedily trying to always grow, especially at any cost. Sometimes it’s okay to just sit there and be who you are, without trying to grow or expand further.
So no I don’t think that we will grow. But maybe that’s okay? Either way it is what it is - we can’t force people to come here against their will, only try to be as welcoming as possible so that they can feel at home here if they do decide to visit.
I absolutely agree, I am also a leftist but constantly stewing in political news isn’t good for your head, or even in a practical sense good for your ability to go actually get involved in stuff outside. You have to take care of yourself if you want emotional energy with which to do any real political labor
I wish we could come up with some collective strategy to create better balance cause this platform tends to share politics as common ground, and with not many people here that means a lot of what gets posted and engaged with is all just news and politics.
And yes, I know everything is political. AND, you need to be able to step away from the politics of the world and catch your breath and be mentally well. Any one thing dominating your time and emotional energy can become unhealthy quickly, especially when its all bad news or small victories that remind you of the broken bigger picture.
Balance is important. I’m thinking about creating a seperate account and blocking all the political communities and filtering by keywords so I can just be here for hobbies and folks chatting when I want that
Balance is important. I’m thinking about creating a seperate account and blocking all the political communities and filtering by keywords so I can just be here for hobbies and folks chatting when I want that
That’s what I do, having two accounts definitely help!
Hey blaze, I haven’t seen you around for a bit ☺️ thanks for the instance reccomendations a while back when I switched from Cris_Color; I’m appreciating the no-fuss out of the way approach to moderation and governance from the .zip folks!
Yeah, I think I should probably sit down and do that at some point, it’d be nice to be able to step in and out of the news as I please
Hope you have a lovely day!
I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about.
Come on, this is not a problem. It’s a feature. As another user said in another reply, having a algorithm curating your feed ends up curating you. It’s even easier here than on reddit since you can even block whole instances! Block the ones that have the most political communities and you will be fine.
I agree with you on one thing, the lack of content on topics that are not tech or political related. But that falls on us, the users. I hope more communities will continue to grow in the future.
Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week.
I don’t know, for me at least, it has been pretty funny, especially these days. You enter fediverse@lemmy.world, see the big pinned thread that says “Don’t whine”, and then hundreds of people whining. It gives me a chuckle.
Yeah, I keep having to remind myself of that. Healthier tech is less convenient and not automatically tailored to our interests/desires by design. More convenience and automatic personalization means more psychological manipulation (at best, into spending more time on the platform so you will see more ads), as well as more data collection and less privacy.
I have been recently struggling to not go back to reddit after 3 years on Lemmy…
Almost everything I read here just makes my mood worse and the people are getting worse and worse. I really hoped it would work as a reddit alternative but it’s exactly the opposite.
After the reddit migration there was a sense of optimism and feeling that this platform could be something great. People were joking and interacting positively.
Then the I/P happened and agenda posting went crazy you had people attacking people where both people were on the same side of the issue. Its gotten consistently worse since then. I/p, Ukraine, Trump, AI its making people miserable and rightfully so. But I wonder what is needed for the path back to optimism and positive discussion.
The answer is extraordinarily simple, notwithstanding the fact that people refuse to hear it. It is called the Intolerance Paradox.
By allowing bullying and other toxic behaviors, we condone them and even amplify them further. Hey look, come join the Threadiverse, we have pics of cats here! Never mind the fact that for every such picture there are twenty pics saying how Western civilization must fall, so that Russia, China, and North Korea may rise!!
Just learn to block people bro! And then also learn to block instances! Except don’t do that! Also, you literally can’t bc the software merely claims that you can, but actually haha you cannot really! Then learn to use keywords, never mind that the software does not let you do that either!!
If people go someplace and constantly get punched in the face then… I for one do not blame them when they stop going there? Which leads to less content, and making this space even more of an echo chamber than it already is.
You can set default subs to show, and block communities. It’s much nicer to look at the news when you want to rather than all the time.
Block users that seem extreme and it will clear up. Its like 10 people responsible for 95% of the posts.
yep.
and like 2-3 instances responsible for those 10 people. they have multiple accounts on various instances.
AI mods, what is going to happen in those subs, just AI generated posts? it wont help in training thier AI if its just those. or they going to try to force the human mods out?
Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab,
Just every other? You must’ve spent quite some time filtering shit already, then.
You see, if you don’t like all the ragebait you are No True Leftist. Disagree with anyone at any time? Gotta hand that card in, bro, 'cause you’ve got to be some fascist or something. Or “shitlib” or whatever cringe terminology the tankies use. This may come as a shock to you but at least Random Angry Dipshit was kind enough to inform you about your entire political stance that you thought was something radically different. Neat trick, right? Aren’t you grateful? I know I am.
I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about.
Correct! It’s also an unappealing and rather significant workload trying to find real activity on real communities on here to subscribe to, so /all is kinda it. Discoverability is garbage, one of many upshots of the way the federation gimmick was implemented.
Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week. If I wasn’t so dedicated to dropping Reddit I think the average Joe would have left by now seeing all of this.
I’m sure they mostly do, if they ever even learn of this place at all. That’s why it keeps being like this. Parts of the fedv are indistinguishable from satire or outright trolling - that’s not counting explicitly blatant troll instances like ml, gr*d and hb. I’d seriously thought some of the leftist infighting meme was… y’know, a meme… Or that “here, I disagree with this one thing you said and now you’re banned from X communities”, from people who spent the last sentence whining about Reddit moderators. (They are right in isolation, just big blubbering hypocrites.)
I’m not saying there ISNT other type of content on lemmy or piefed it just feels like the stuff that floats to the top is political
Engagementbait on a platform that isn’t even pushing “the algorithm” that way. Nifty, right?
It’s not going to change, or even get any less of a pain to try to curate unless tooling gets better. It won’t, because the Lemmy devs at least are tankie idiots who have no interest in making anything easy to curate (because then, the very first thing to go is their main shitholes for being blatant assholes to everyone except dictators)
Edit: on that note, instance blocks on ml, gr*d and hb are an absolute must
Fwiw, PieFed has mostly solved the discoverability issue. Here’s a neat trick: make a new account on PieFed.social (note that PieFed.World won’t work, since they haven’t bothered to flesh out their categories of communities) and go through the sign-up wizard. Browse for a week, and every time you see a community that you like, subscribe to it also in your Lemmy account.
Make sure to also check out not only your Subscribed feed, but also the categories of communities too. It opens up a whole new method of browsing content. I get literal and actual poetry posts (despite ~10 upvotes + 0 comments) occasionally crossing my Subscribed feed this way, and if I feel in the mood it’s fairly easy (even for you now without an account login needed) to see it at https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft.
Lemmy has nothing remotely like this, even though I like its UI.
